Need a recommendation...

[Oscar09]

So i just found out my iMac has a defective hard drive according to Apple. Its part of a batch that has faulty hard drives and well this worries me since i have all my music stored in the hard drive and no back up. I am eligible to get a brand new hard drive installed by Apple for free, all i have to do is take it to my local Apple store. But I want to know what you guys recommend for an external HD. I am on a real budget here so i wouldnt want to spend more than $200. All i want to do is store my music witch is only about only 80GB and my pictures. Ive been looking at those LaCie Porche design ones priced at $140. I just want to Back up my music and have it stored in case of any emergency, i will not be playing it out of the external hard drive. I am planning on getting a music dedicated Mac Mini in the near future with SSD and i will be moving my music to the SSD but for now i just want something reliable to back up my music. Any help is much appreciated, i am not very informed in this subject so any light anyone shines this way i will appreciate a lot. Thanks!

[jackfish]

You can get a Western Digital My Book Essential 1 TB USB 3.0 drive for $100. I've got the 2 TB version which works flawlessly.

[bluesman]

I have a 2 Seagate GoFlex backups - one's a network drive and one's a USB. I lost my photo NAS back in October (30k+ files) and the networked Seagate restored it onto the replacement HDs simply and easily. I also had a HD failure that took out one of the two RAID discs in my primary music NAS (a D-link DNS320). Again, the angst was heavy until the server rebuilt the second disc from the first one - and that's also backed up on a Seagate.

 

Trust me - you do NOT want to know the feeling you get when you realize that all of your media files are gone. Even though I have redundant backup with off-site storage of a full copy, I didn't rest until I saw the fully restored files where they belong.

[NOMBEDES]

I also had the APPL sponsored hard drive swap. I was very uneasy, but I have to say that my "Time Machine" back up worked without a hitch. It was nice to see something work as advertised in this day and age.

 

I also have the Western Digital 1TB external drive. No problems.

[Oscar09]

Thanks for the support guys. Im going to look into a western digital or a lacie. Whats the best way to backup the music files?

[Jud]

Thanks for the support guys. Im going to look into a western digital or a lacie. Whats the best way to backup the music files?

 

Best way? Go to the Apple Store when you're getting your internal HD replaced, bring along your external HD, and ask them if they would back up your music folder onto the external drive at the same time they transfer it to the new internal drive. They're usually very nice about stuff like that.

[wgb113]

I use the Lacie Porsche P9221 as my main drive and it works great.

 

I use another Lacie D2 Quadra with Time Machine and then I manually back up the Lacie P9221 onto a second Lacie D2 Quadra once per month.

 

Bill